News from the Provost
July 1st, 2024
We just ended a fantastic year at Kresge. In September, Chancellor Cynthia Larive and I opened three new first-year dorms and the Kresge College Academic Center. Designed by Studio Gang, the buildings have already won two major architecture and design awards. Construction continues for Phase 2, which includes building a new Town Hall and renovating Kresge’s original buildings to preserve Charles Moore’s and William Turnbull’s iconic design while updating the interiors for the 21st century.
In Fall Core, the Kresge frosh read Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Gumbs, a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation. Each student also conducted an oral history with an important elder in their life, then turned that oral history into a final creative project (students made short films, wrote poems, drew comics, etc). Kresge’s other experiential learning seminars – Natural History Practicum, Power of Filmmaking, Creative Writing – filled to capacity. And this year, we introduced a new research-oriented course designed specifically for incoming Transfer students, who make up more than 30% of our student body.
We revitalized Writers House, a themed housing floor and accompanying speaker series, bringing novelists Rita Chang-Eppig and Kate Folk to Kresge. Kresge’s Media & Society series hosted Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalists Martha Mendoza and Juliet Linderman, as well as Joe Garcia, an incarcerated correspondent for the Prison Journalism Project whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and Washington Post. The Kresge Garden Co-op had another successful year, culminating in the KGC-directed internship course for fellow students to learn about sustainable gardening and food-growing. As always, Kresge led UCSC’s PRIDE celebration in May. And we capped off our year with a beautiful Commencement ceremony and a keynote address by poet Ronaldo Wilson, Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, who recited a poem he had written specially for the Kresge graduating class of 2024.
Looking ahead, we have exciting new curricular plans for next year. We surveyed our first-year students, and it turns out that they not only prefer reading on paper instead of digitally (and research shows students learn better this way), but they also want to put away their phones! So, Fall ‘24 Core will focus on how to bring our attention to the physical world around us – people, animals, birds, trees, books – with Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy as our main text. We will also begin to offer a seminar series called Learn to Love Reading Again, anchored by three principles: we read for the sake of reading, not for a test; we engage in discussion to deepen our insight; and we read on paper. Finally, we will offer three new practicums: Making Media for Climate Justice; Making Media for Immigration Justice; and Theater Arts for Public Speaking.
Finally, we have a new logo that reproduces the window frits on our new buildings that prevent birds from flying into the glass. For the multispecies frits, Studio Gang used drawings of the various critters living amongst us that our students learn about in Kresge’s Natural History Practicum course.
Fiat Slug, Fiat Kresge!
-Provost Mayanthi Fernando
